But it doesn’t stop there.

The same theme is showing up in pitch decks, investor memos and agency roadmaps. The idea of overhauling creative at an operational level — structured, scored and optimized in real time.

In practice, this looks a lot like a long-promised idea finally edging toward reality: personalization at scale, but with the infrastructure to actually deliver it.

“Today we talk about content at scale, this model that we’re trying to drive,” said Selina Sykes, global vp and head of marketing transformation, beauty and wellbeing. “You couldn’t do it without these tools.”

The tools in question come via the Brandtech Group, which Sykes’ team has worked with for the past year. In that time, its output has jumped from 20 assets per campaign to 400 assets per product. 

But that scale isn’t coming from only more creative ideas — it’s increasingly coming from a system that measures, iterates and feeds performance data back into the tools. It pulls from multiple LLMs, with direct AP hooks into platforms like Meta and TikTok to assess effectiveness.

“We’ve got brand lift studies that we run on our campaigns… but we’re also starting to see how it’s this kind of content is driving our whole marketing effectiveness,” said Sykes. “So yes, return on investment is something that we’ll really be looking at and building models for.”

Unilever may be out in front, but others are closing in. As content gets easier and faster to produce, the challenge for CMOs is no longer volume — its value. That’s where the focus is shifting. The next phase of creative isn’t just about the idea — it’s about the system behind it. One that can distribute, optimize and measure creative the same way marketers already treat media. 

That shift is already playing out globally. In China, CPG giant Kimberly Clark is leaning hard into AI-fueled production. 

“We’re making maybe hundreds of ads a day that are AI-fueled,” said CEO Michael Hsu on his earnings call earlier last week (August 1).

What’s more, it’s happening in-house. 

“We feel like in that instance, this in-house capability brings us speed of execution plus improved creative quality,” Hsu continued. 

A few days later, Yum! Brands CEO David Gibbs took it a step further. 

“AI is “supercharging our marketing,” he said on the company’s earnings call (August 5). It has sent over 200 million AI-generated communications so far this year, delivering — by his estimates, up to five times incrementality over traditional campaigns. 

Promising as all this sounds, most of these efforts are still small in scope, and often experimental. But the direction is clear. AI is pushing marketers to rethink how creative is made, where it lives and who controls it.

“We’ve just done a hackathon with our tech team where we’ve answered a brief from one of our clients and internal team,” said Ben Terry, the chief technology officer at independent agency Journey Further. “We looked at how we could connect the data on creative  performance that we’re getting from our partner platforms and then join that together with an agentic workflow.”

Like many of its peers, the agency is focused on speed and scale — more versions of better performing ads, deployed with greater precision across owned and paid channels. But the real differentiator isn’t the tools themselves. It’s the data they run on. The tech stacks may look the same, but the advantage will go to the marketers who know what to feed into them — and what to do with what comes out. 

As Michael Harrison, managing partner at Winterberry Group, put it: “The real differentiator here will come down to how you collect and structure, structure, store and activate the data.”

If that happens — if marketers can see what’s working at the asset level, in real-time — it won’t only reshape the creative process. It will start to change the underlying economics of advertising. 

Because if personalization at scale becomes faster, cheaper and more efficient than anything that came before it, the next big question will be around value. Not just what creative delivers, but what it’s worth. And for CMOs and agency leaders, that means eventually confronting a long-contentious topic: how creative gets priced. 

“Its going to become a major talking point,” said said Bruce Biegel, senior managing partner at Winterberry Group. “Clients are already starting to ask how to implement these systems — and what that means for their organizations, their partners, and ultimately, the pricing model that sits around it.”

In other words, change won’t happen overnight. Expect progress to be uneven — until it isn’t.

“This is happening really fast and really slow,” said Barney Worfolk-Smith, chief growth officer at creative data provider DAIVID. “In many ways, it feels like we’re kind of tickling the edges and I have a suspicion that’s, at least in part, driven by trepidation over manpower and operational issues.”